$899! That's one expensive picture frame.
If it is networked, why not lose the HD and all the smarts, just have enough memory for a few pictures (for a slideshow) and have a server (your mac with iPhoto, for example) do the heavy lifting. If it were closer to $200, I would consider getting one.

It really needs to support camera RAW formats.
The people that are going to buy a $900 picture frame are also going to have a camera that shoots RAW...

For that price, you could buy a good 17" LCD monitor and a Mac Mini and have the same functionality, plus a computer....

Hmmm, maybe I'm on to something.

1) Buy a 17" LCD monitor and take off the stand.

2) Velcro Mac Mini (with Airport and/or Bluetooth) to back of monitor

3) Encase all the above in a shadow-box style frame. Running the power cords from Mini and the monitor might be a pain, but its doable.

Voila'! LCD art frame with a ton of smarts! Run the Mac Mini with either a bluetooth mouse and keyboard or via VNC and use it to run iPhoto... and iTunes as your house music server... and an X10 controller like SmartHouse to be a house controller...

Or you could skip step 3 and just hide the Mini somewhere out of sight and put a nice faux frame around the monitor, running an iPhoto screen saver.

Quote

Anonymous wrote:
It really needs to support camera RAW formats.
The people that are going to buy a $900 picture frame are also going to have a camera that shoots RAW...

Well then you're just wasting hard drive space.

I like to run my photos as a screen saver but I've found that looking at the original files, which are only 1 or 2 MB JPEGs in my case, taxes the system to the point where the screen saver sometimes refuses to work. The problem is that I have thousands of photos, I think, and it tries to keep track of all of them, or something.

Anyway, I run my newest photos through a Photoshop action that copies them all to 640x480 JPEGs at medium quality. The "copy" folder ends up being a few MBs instead of the Gigabytes that the actual photos are, and my screen saver can display them with no problem. They look just fine, too. There's no reason I need to look at a photo that has several times more pixels in it then my screen can display. In my case, I'm blowing up the pictures to view them now, and it looks fine.

I realize that this is not the most convinient thing in the world, which brings me to my point. This frame should come with software that you load on your computer which will look at all the photos you tell it to see, and it will automaticly make small versions of them which you can burn to CD or transfer over a network or whatever. It makes it a much easier thing to take ALL your photos somewhere.

The point is, all of these different "display" technologies need to follow the lead of the iPod Photo. It saves small versions of your photos that are made to be viewed on television screens. If it all happens automaticly, you don't even notice it and you gain a ton of more hard drive space when you're doing it. Yeah, I want my full-sized images saved for printing out, but other then that, I don't need several-MB-large files going over my network just to use as a screen saver. The iPods got it right, hopefully these other companies can follow their lead.

PhotoVu LLC here:

Thank you for the disussion.

The power of our solution is that you DO NOT need to make/maintain a separate low resolution copy of each picture in your photo database. We read directly from your iPhoto database, and scale and crop to the 1280*1024 display in real time. Simply manage all your photos, in their native resolution, in one location with iPhoto and your Mac, then we do the rest -- playing any album, smart album, your whole Photo Libray, etc., that you choose. That includes all the "heavy lifting" with our built-in computer inside the frame.

All this results in practically zero load on your computer's cpu so it doesn't get bogged down, no separate photos to keep track of on the frame, and no velcro! Different approaches for different folks, but my wife doesn't want a computer hanging off her living room wall and either do a lot of our very happy customers.

^^

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that your solution is ideal, in my case the Apple screensaver CAN'T manage to do that.

If this actually does it then I agree that it's the way to go.

Digital Multimedia Player More Affordable
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Read Letsgodigital Review
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